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Even the head of the county's office of public integrity failed to file an oath of office

The Monroe County Office Building in Rochester.(Photo: Democrat and Chronicle file photo)

Last week, I reported that for perhaps as long as two decades, officials overseeing Monroe County's public agencies and commissions haven't been filing paperwork with the County Clerk's office to make their appointments legally valid.

Monroe County Spokesman Brett Walsh called the story a "nothingburger" and said it was a technical oversight that didn't really mean anything in the grand scope of things; that all the decisions and actions taken by the boards in question were still valid and it was all just a matter of a paperwork oversight.

As of last week — even though numerous agencies and commissions cancelled their May and June meetings after word got out about the paperwork snafu, out of what Walsh said was "an abundance of caution" — the scope of the oath issue wasn't clear.

Now it is.

Indeed, as a "matter of urgency" the County Legislature plans to reappoint on Tuesday nearly three dozen agency, commission and even department heads who apparently did not properly file their oaths of office as required by state law.

So, not only does the issue affect board members of COMIDA, the Water Authority, Monroe Community College, Airport Authority, Board of Health and the Civil Service Commission, but also the people hired to run some vital county departments.

Fascinatingly, those positions include heads of public safety, public health, aviation, Monroe Community Hospital, Veterans Service agency and health and human services.

Perhaps most intriguingly, that list also includes David T. Moore, appointed last summer as the Director of the Office of Public Integrity, the county's in-house ethics watchdog.

Last week, County Clerk Adam Bello took the opportunity to make some political hay. The oath issue was twofold: the County Legislature 1) hasn't been notifying the clerk's office of the appointments, a process that starts a 30-day countdown for the oaths to be filed, and 2) the oaths weren't getting filed anyway, with rare exception.

Bello questioned whether or not the lack of oaths left all the appointees in a precarious position where they could be dismissed by the whim of the legislature, rather than having a set term of office.

Walsh punched back, accusing Bello of "grandstanding," rather than taking the short walk across the hallway to hash the issue out with the County Executive. And besides, he said, the County was already well aware of the issue and taking corrective steps following a news report from WHAM-TV (Channel 13) a few weeks prior that showed most members of the County of Monroe Industrial Development Agency hadn't filed their oaths of office.

Here's the thing: maybe this really is a big pile of nothing, no harm no foul, all the board decisions are still valid and good and everybody gets to go on with their business. The County Legislature makes new appointments, the paperwork gets filed, the appointees line up at the Clerk's Office and sign their names and it's all good in the end.

Well, sure, OK. In terms of pinging the public outrage meter, maybe this all seems a bit picayune.

But the back-and-forth about whether it's a just a paperwork mix-up or a purposeful pattern of omissions obscures the biggest question remaining:

If we can't depend on our county government to get the little stuff right, what does that say about the big stuff?